Andrew M Brown is the Telegraph's obituaries editor.

How to discourage marauding urban foxes

The Stoke Newington home of Pauline Koupparis, left, where her twin daughters were attacked by a fox, and right, a fox trap in the garden (Photo: Will Wintercross)

Lola and Isabella Koupparis, twin baby girls of just nine months, are recovering from arm and facial wounds today after being being mauled by a fox as they slept in their cots a couple of nights ago.

I find it alarming enough that foxes should be so audacious as to enter a human dwelling in the first place, let alone that they should attack the people inside. It's even more worrying to see that the victims lived in a handsome three-storey Victorian terrace (see above), and the fox apparently ran up the stairs.

But anyone who lives in the parts of a city where foxes roam the streets at night, as I do, will know that these creatures have adapted completely to the urban, or suburban, environment. Where I live we can hear their spooky, keening mating calls in the night. They're certainly not frightened of humans.

The local foxes in our neighbourhood even seem to know the day when the bins are due to be collected. They emerge in the small hours to sniff around the bags of refuse. And no wonder: it's like feeding time at the zoo for them. The following morning, pavements are strewn with chicken carcasses and empty yogurt pots, where the animals have torn open the flimsier rubbish sacks.

I am sure Pete Wedderburn is right to say that hunting wouldn't have stopped this attack. Hunting never made much of a dent on numbers. But I just heard one simple solution to an excess of town foxes, proposed by Tom McCourt from Hackney council, on The World at One. He said: stop feeding them. People should try packing their rubbish more securely and not chucking away so much perfectly good food in the first place. Then there'd be nothing for the foxes to eat, and they'd soon push off somewhere else.